The 2015 adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5)—achieving women’s empowerment and gender equality—prompted a growth in metrics to monitor global progress toward this goal. With the February 22 launch of the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS), IFPRI Director General Johan Swinnen noted, “we are seeing a major step in the long-running strategy to come up with measurements and metrics for women’s empowerment, in agriculture and beyond.”
What is WEMNS?
While there has been “tremendous growth” in empowerment metrics, many (including IFPRI’s more established Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) family of tools) “were context-specific, limited to agriculture, and therefore unable to capture how empowerment changes as economies transform,” said Agnes Quisumbing, one of the co-creators of WEMNS and Senior Research Fellow in IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI) Unit.
WEMNS was designed to be a streamlined instrument that assesses multiple dimensions of empowerment across individuals with a variety of livelihood strategies in both rural and urban settings, suitable for large scale, multitopic surveys. In the next stage of scaling up, WEMNS will be used by the 50x2030 Initiative—which aims to transform agricultural data systems to improve rural livelihoods and food security—in three African countries.
The tool was jointly developed by IFPRI, Emory University, Oxford University, and the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study Unit (LSMS) in collaboration with partners in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi, and Nepal. The development of WEMNS was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development. WEMNS “is a multi-partner effort. We’re really trying to bridge not just the global agricultural data gap with the 50x2030 Initiative … WEMNS adds on to that, and is aligned with SDG 5 on women’s empowerment and gender equality, as well as other relevant SDGs,” said Ruth Meinzen-Dick, co-creator and Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR) Unit.